SoX

SoX is the Swiss Army knife of sound processing
tools: it can convert sound files between many
different file formats and audio devices, and can
apply many sound effects and transformations, as
well as doing basic analysis and providing input
to more capable analysis and plotting tools.

Recent releases

Release Notes: The processing chain now supports unlimited input files, multiple input pipes, and in some cases, multiple output files. Improved large file support and improved rate/dither/mcompand effects. A new Mac OSX audio driver as well as several new effects.

Release Notes: Highlights of this release include support for FLAC files, 24-bit audio, new equalizer effects, enhanced command line options and output display, the ability to merge 2 mono files into 1 stereo file, and much more. There are also many bugfixes.

Recent comments

more problems
I see it's been five years since I commented on this program. There seems to have been quite a bit of bitrot since then. Some of this may be packaging-related.

After upgrading my ubuntu box to hardy heron, I noticed that sox's play command no longer worked: &quot;play soxio: Failed writing `default': unknown file type `ao'.&quot; Ogg support has also disappeared. None of this seems to be fixed by installing the libsox-fmt-ogg or libsox-fmt-all packages.

Use of the tempo command causes a segfault on my x64 box. This bug was supposed to have been fixed in sox 14.0.1-2, but that version segfaulted for me too.

Sox used to be able to decode mp3s without having lame installed; now it no longer does. IIRC there are no license or patent issues with decoders for mp3, so I don't understand why this situation has gotten worse rather than better.

Sox used to automatically recognize if you had lame installed before you compiled it, and would then take mp3 as an input format. That no longer seems to work.

Judging from discussion on ubuntuforms, there seem to be a lot of people struggling to get this kind of stuff to work:

useful but buggy
I use sox a lot, and find it very useful. However, it does have some bugs, and I've never had any luck getting in touch with the author about them, after trying all three e-mail addresses he has listed publicly. (Some mails bounced, others got no response.)

The bugs I've encountered are:

1. Doing "speed 0.5" can cause it to go into an endless loop and fill your hard disk. (This seems to occur with any number less than about 0.7.)

2. The split command doesn't work the way the man page claims it does; you have to do "-c 2" instead.